Last Straw

Obama accept­ing his Nobel prize:

… per­haps the most pro­found issue sur­round­ing my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is wind­ing down. The other is a con­flict that Amer­ica did not seek …

Except that Amer­ica did seek armed con­flict with Afgh­anistan.

In Octo­ber of 2001 the Taliban pub­licly offered to hand Osama bin Laden over to a third coun­try, provided the U.S. hal­ted the illegal bomb­ing of Afgh­anistan and pro­duced the neces­sary evid­ence about involve­ment of bin Laden or any of his asso­ci­ates in the 11 Septem­ber attacks. Bush rejec­ted this, put­ting an end to any pos­sib­il­ity of a poten­tially peace­ful, legal res­ol­u­tion to the events of 11 Septem­ber 2001, and opened up the way for the inva­sion and occu­pa­tion of Afgh­anistan, Iraq and the threat of inva­sion of Iran, along with the mil­lions who have lost their lives or had them des­troyed as a result.

Jac­qui Janes believes her son is dead because the war in Afgh­anistan is under-resourced. He’s not. He’s dead because he was fight­ing an unjust war. The stated aim of the inva­sion of Afgh­anistan was to find Osama bin Laden and other high-ranking Al-Qaeda members. On 14 Octo­ber, 2001, the Taliban pub­licly offered to hand over Osama […]

Ahh, yes, there’s noth­ing like a little Amer­ican excep­tion­al­ism to get one going in the morn­ing. Accord­ing to Reu­ters, Col­onel Greg Julian, a U.S. mil­it­ary spokes­man in Kabul, has been com­plain­ing that the Taliban is viol­at­ing inter­na­tional law by parad­ing a cap­tured U.S. sol­dier on cam­era. It seems Col­onel Julian didn’t get the memo: the […]

Afgh­anistan is spun as a war we should be fight­ing. In fact, a fact long for­got­ten by the West­ern media and oth­ers involved in the inva­sion of Afgh­anistan is that, on 14 Octo­ber, 2001, the Taliban pub­licly offered to hand over Osama bin Laden to a third coun­try, provided the U.S. hal­ted the illegal bombing […]

Chris Walker, writ­ing to the The Her­ald (webpage removed):

It’s one of life’s more sav­age iron­ies, but one which has become drear­ily famil­iar, that your head­line “Death toll rises in Afgh­anistan” (Leader, The Her­ald, July 11) means Brit­ish mil­it­ary fatalities.

These are given piquancy because they exceed sim­ilar losses incurred in Iraq. Thus the headline.

As a mat­ter of fact, com­bined, they approx­im­ate the loss of Iraqi civil­ian lives only last week — repeat, week — in Mosul and Bagh­dad. But that’s how war’s rhythms (and its suc­cesses and fail­ures) are cal­ib­rated. That hun­dreds of thou­sands of Iraqis and Afgh­anis have died since 2001 hardly raises an eye­brow, far less engen­der­ing a head­line. But, then, death “over there” was held to be one of the reas­ons for inva­sion, and for stop­ping it “over here”, on the streets of Leeds, Lon­don or Glas­gow. Or so it is said. Thus death over there, except­ing ours, is incon­sequen­tial in our mind­set: even a mil­lion deaths by inva­sion and occupation.

Accord­ing to Jack Straw, in response to George Galloway’s quite reas­on­able point that the cow­ardly attacks on Afgh­anistan and Iraq increased the threat of ter­ror­ist attack in Bri­tain, “People have to remem­ber that 11 Septem­ber was in 2001 before the mil­it­ary action.” This cheap little chunk of self-deluded spin is an attempt to weave the story that the Septem­ber 11 attacks came out of the blue.